


Tattoo

by TheRavenintheMoon



Series: Long Lost Souls [14]
Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 10:54:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9720524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheRavenintheMoon/pseuds/TheRavenintheMoon
Summary: A small character study of a young orc desperate to prove herself. Written pre-MoP.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Blizzard owns World of Warcraft. I own Lirshala.
> 
> Shala also appears in "Laugh."

_**Tattoo**_  
  
_Lirshala_  
  
    The Warchief’s recruitment officer would have to come the day her hands were swathed in bandages and she couldn’t lift so much as a fork. He’d think she was a baby. He’d think she’d burned herself. He would make her wait until next year, if she even got in at all. Maybe he’d think she wasn’t fit for anything more than grunt work in some shop…  
    “Stop fussing, Shala,” Ma said calmly.  
    “I didn’t say anything,” she frowned.  
    Ma laughed softly. “You didn’t have to. You’ll be fine.”  
    Lirshala grunted impolitely and went back to picking at her bandages. Even the familiar smell of tanned hides, the familiar sounds of needles punching through thick leather, of scissors clipping thread, and of many people going about the business of the workroom of a leather goods shop couldn’t calm her nerves. They’d been here for several months now, since the river had risen uncontrollably in an inexorable tide… She winced as she squeezed both her hands into fists, her right hand for luck, and her left to ward off bad memories. She loosened them immediately, easing her stretched skin.  
    More than anything, she wished she were back home on the farm where Ma had been a tanner and Pa had been a blacksmith. She wanted to sit again on a warm night at her mother’s feet, stitching the scraps from her mother’s current project into a doll for her little sister as her brother slept in the cradle, and her Pa’s big deep voice told his girls stories his father had told him about the old wars. She glanced at her hands again, tears pricking her eyes. That was what this had all been for. To remind herself that she could never go home.  
    The recruitment officer finished speaking to the tanner’s apprentice, a big boy proud of his scraggly beard who was clever with leather and not much else. Lirshala dashed away the beginnings of her tears, brushed her loose violet hair away from her face, and tried to look brave, but her eyes were still over-bright.  
    “What’s your name, girl?” the officer asked as he dragged his chair over to hers with a loud scrape. His voice was gruff, but not unkind.  
    “Lirshala, sir,” she said politely. He sniffed and riffled through a stack of parchments until he found the one he was looking for.  
    “Any good with a blade, Lirshala?” he asked.  
    She bit her lip. “Pa had only just decided I was competent with staff work, sir, when he was called to Ashenvale. He never came home.” She gritted her teeth, blue eyes bright as she stopped herself from crying at the memory, and also at the pain in her left hand as she clenched it for strength.  
    The officer frowned. “Did no one else continue teaching you? A brother, perhaps?” he asked.  
    She shook her head. “No, sir. My brother was just a baby. But my auntie taught me some fire spells, for when the raptors tried to take some of our pigs…”  
    The officer blinked, staring at the sheet of parchment in his hand. “Your paperwork doesn’t say you’re a mage,” he told her.  
    “Pa always wanted a warrior, sir,” she said, wincing as she clenched her right hand.  
    The officer frowned again. “The Warchief’s army can hardly move for soldiers who think they’re warriors. Mages are as valuable as they are hard to find in Orgrimmar. If you have talent, you could go very far.”  
    Blue eyes shone earnestly in her green-brown face. “Really, sir?” she asked, as if it were a relief to think she wouldn’t have to try to distinguish herself from very many others. “I could fight?”  
    “Do you want to fight?” he asked.  
    “Oh, yes,” she said eagerly, then remembered herself and added more soberly, “sir.” She ruined it by wincing a bit as she clenched her right hand tightly.  
    He suppressed a smile at her eagerness. “What happened to your hands, girl?” he asked.  
    She swallowed, eyes going a bit distant as memory swamped her. “I got them tattooed, sir,” she answered quietly.  
    “Most girls don’t bother,” he said, head tilted curiously. “They find other ways to adorn themselves.”  
    “Yes, but, before my father left—”  
    As she explained, she could almost hear the words her father had spoken so long ago, his reassuring voice sadder than she had ever heard it.  
  
∞  
  
    “Come here, Shala,” Pa said urgently. She was already heading across to his forge for her daily lessons. She broke into a run at his tone and arrived just a bit out of breath, heading, out of habit, to pick up her long, smooth staff.  
    “You won’t need that today,” he told her.  
    “What are we doing?” the twelve-year-old asked curiously, moving to stand next to him.  
    “I’m only going to have time to teach you one lesson today,” he said gravely. “I will begin your instruction, but this is one that you will be learning over and over for the rest of your life.”  
    Eyes wide, she asked, a little timidly, “What lesson, Pa?”  
    “How to keep going, even when you think that things hurt too much to continue,” he said.  
    She swallowed. “I don’t understand.”  
    “See these?” he asked, holding up his hands to display the tattoo on the back of each. “Do you know what they are?”  
    She nodded, touching each as she named them.  
    “Protection,” she said, tapping the circled cross on his left hand. “And victory,” she said, tapping the five-point star on his right. Pa nodded.  
    “I’m going to have to leave soon. I need you, Lirshala, to be my strength while I am gone. So I’m going to give you these, so you’ll always remember.”  
    He took her half-grown hands in his, and spent the afternoon tracing the marks into her smooth skin. She cried, but quietly, not wanting him to think she was weak. And when he’d bandaged her hands, he took her home and put her to bed.  
    “I’m proud of you, little Shala. I always will be.”  
  
∞  
  
    “But I failed, sir,” she told the recruitment officer. “The water rushed in as the river rose up over the house. My brother was swept downstream while my sister remained trapped in the flooding house. I had to choose, sir. And I trusted someone else to get Halla out, and swam after Thur. But I couldn’t reach him. He kept swirling just past where I could reach, and then he disappeared… The river took them both, sir.” She looked down at her hands. “I’d grown out of Pa’s tattoos—they were all stretched and faded from when I grew, see. I was waiting for him to come home, even after we had word that the elves had got him. Arrow to the throat.” She clenched both her hands tightly.  
    “Yesterday, I’d finally managed to save up enough money from my sewing,” she gestured at the leather armor on the table, “so that I could have them redone. So that I never forget again, sir.” She no longer flinched, even though both her hands were clenched so tightly they must have been hurting her, and there was a ferocity in her face that hadn’t been there before.  
    The recruitment officer nodded, smiling sadly. “The river took something from all of us when it left its banks.” He stood, stamping her piece of parchment and handing it to her. “When your hands are healed enough, report to Kaltunk in the Valley of Trials. Welcome to the Horde, Lirshala. Throm’ka.”  
    He stumped out.  
    Lirshala looked up from her parchment, eyes shining. Ma smiled. “I’m proud of you, Shala. You keep that left hand clenched tight when you go.”  
    “I’d rather my right, Ma. Victory first, then protection,” she said. “For Pa.” Already she was unwrapping her bandages to see just how healed her hands were.  
    Ma shook her head fondly, sewing a little quicker on the amulet she was making for a goodbye present, with the circled cross stitched in for a little extra protection. Her girl would learn. All in good time.


End file.
